During the night I met the leaders of three councils: Southwark, Wandsworth and....drum roll.... Westminster. I had the chance to talk cycling with each of them. And what fascinated me was just how differently each of them engaged with and understood why people have been out on their bikes protesting for better conditions.

Peter John then introduced me to the Conservative leader of Wandsworth Council, Ravi Govindia. Now, Wandsworth has slowly started to re-embrace the bicycle. This is a borough that did some good things a decade ago and then decided to utterly ignore bicycles until very recently. What Mr Govindia told me, though, did get me thinking. He made two points: Firstly, he explained that he wants to see normal people out on bikes doing normal journeys. He said that the bulk of people using bicycles in his borough are commuters - fit, young, speedy. And he's probably right.

My point to Ravi Govindia was that if he wants people to use bikes rather than cars (and remember, the majority of car journeys in outer London are under 5 miles, therefore hugely easy by bike), he's going to have to build Safe Space For Cycling. Simple really. If you want to see mums, dads, older people, kids, normal, average people out on bikes, you need to build for it. And that means creating SPACE that is sensitive to the needs of people on bikes. The only way I know of crossing the centre of Wandsworth east to west on a bike right now, for example, is through the massive Wandsworth gyratory. That means pedalling across five to six lanes of fast-moving traffic, several times in a row. It's horrific.

And then we came to Westminster's leader who made nice comments about wanting to do more but struck me as not really seeing this as a particularly pressing issue.

Ravi Govindia also made another point that I thought very useful. He mentioned that he found it difficult to engage with cycling groups because (and I paraphrase) "they seem to want everything". Here's a man who is extremely busy and for whom cycling is an issue but only a very small one in the scheme of things. He needs to hear one single message, and one alone.

My point is pretty simple really. It is four years ago that I sat in a room with the London Cycling Campaign and one of their best campaigners coined the campaign term 'Space 4 Cycling'. It has taken four years to get to the point where people who use bikes are starting to talk about demanding 'Space 4 Cycling'. It will take more years before our politicians, people like Ravi Govindia of Wandsworth, actually start to hear what we're all calling for. We have to rally around a single message and we have to keep pushing that message home. Again and again and again. Until we're sick of it. Only then can we expect that our politicians will have started hearing our message for the very first time.

The difference in the Square Mile, however, is that all streets within its boundaries (with a possible exception of Victoria Embankment), will become 20mph, including traffic-filled sewers like Farringdon Road and, I expect, much of Blackfriars Bridge as well. In other boroughs, you have 30 or 40mph main streets but 20mph quiet streets. In the Square Mile, the whole lot will be going 20mph.

And the City is aware that by creating a 20mph zone, it creates a meaningfully better environment for doing business - it is more likely to remain a place that people want to be; to do business and to locate their offices.

Provided it is policed properly, and in particular at spots like Blackfriars Bridge and Holborn, where people tend to drive at excessive and intimidating speeds, this vote could make a significant difference for the vast majority of people in the Square Mile who get about on foot and for those of us on bikes.

City of London wants you to plonk yourself in front of the motor traffic on Cheapside

The City of London wants us to all treat other road users 'like eggs' on Cheapside. It should be building roads that work, not roads that cause conflict the way that Cheapside does.

The City wants you to 'use the full width of the lane', to do exactly what hardly anyone wants to do on this road. Some people in the City think that they can encourage people to do this, even though they admit in private that isn't what is actually happening on the street.

The reality is that people are intimidated into the side of the carriageway by aggressive driving and because they don't want to put themselves in the way of a massive truck, bus or taxi. And, frankly, why should they. What the City should be doing on Cheapside is creating "Safe Space for Cycling". Very simple. Thousands of people took to the streets a couple of weeks ago to demand exactly that. Instead, the City is living in a sort of mythical denial and hoping to encourage people to treat each other like 'eggs' (?!?!) Somehow, everyone will just rub along nicely then. That's never going to happen. What needs to happen on a road like this, which is busy, congested (and now overly narrow) is a flow for people on bikes, for people on foot and for people in motor vehicles.

See for yourselves what you think. I think it's patronising, misguided and completely misses the point that on busy, main through routes, local authorities need to build 'Safe Space for Cycling'. End of story.

What did the Freight Trade Association, the body that represents HALF the UK freight fleet have to say on the matter? This, believe it or not, is what the Association's Director of Policy, Karen Dee (I've met her and she said pretty similar stuff in public) had to say:

A responsible lorry-driver on his phone in the middle of the A3 at Kennington, next to the Cycle Super Highway

The last time that I had a horrible near-miss experience on my bike was on Super Highway 8. Cycling in from Wandsworth, there were parked cars on my left and in the middle of the road, a traffic island. At exactly this point, an articulated lorry decided to overtake me. The lorry would certainly hit the back of my bicycle and send me flying. My only option was to bail off the road. So I did. I bailed into a parked car. A shocked pedestrian came to help me.

The Freight Trade Association is right that road users must ride or drive responsibly. Yes, there is a problem with some cyclists not obeying some traffic regulations.

The pendulum of responsibility swings both ways, Ms Dee, and if you're going to start throwing stones about the place, you'd better be sure your own glasshouse is made of stronger materials.

The Freight Trade Association could, and should, be supporting the moves to create safe space for cycling. Instead, it is victim-blaming in the extreme. Instead of calling for ways to magically make hundreds of thousands of people cycle as if they were in motor vehicles, it could join the current thinking, displayed earlier this week at the London Cycling Campaign ride to Parliament: Create Safe Space for Cycling. That's the only way to keep lorries and people on bikes apart. And it's the only thing that's going to work. Victim-blaming is immature, irresponsible and makes dialogue an impossibility. The Freight Trade Association should know better.

Boris Johnson and Stephen Hammond MP, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Transport, earlier today. No thanks to the Freight Trade Association

Let's take the conflict out of our transport networks. Let's encourage all road users to act responsibly but let's also look at how the transport network works for different types of people who need to use it. Let's not resort to pathetically juvenile and extremely irresponsible victim-blaming of the sort that the Freight Trade Association has just displayed.

Meanwhile, as the MPs debated, a one-mile long queue of people on bikes threaded their way past Parliament to show their support for the MPs and asking them to think bold and deliver bold. You could see people in the flashride leaving Westminster Bridge as others had already crossed Lambeth Bridge further upriver.

Normal folk out on bicycles just being themselves this evening. This is what cycling should be like all the time. And it could be if the government acted on it.

The problem with the vote is that it doesn't really mean anything at this stage; it is (as far as I understand) no more than a statement of support. It doesn't compel the government to actually do anything. The government has at last started dribbling some money towards cycling after killing off the cycling budget in its bonfire of the quangos a couple of years ago. But it is patchy money, limited to a handful of locations that will benefit less than 10% of the population for about two years. As Chris Boardman of British Cycling put it so eloquently (as is his usual skill), we have a government that has committed over £15billion to road widening and new bypasses for the next 10 years. But it has only committed £159 million to cycling and even then only for a couple of years' worth of funding. To coin a phrase from Boris Johnson, cycling is getting 'chicken feed'.

To be fair to the Mayor of London, London is actually starting to get serious about bicycle transport at last. Later this summer, our first European-style cycle highway opens between Bow and Stratford. And some serious money has been hard fought for and won by Boris Johnson. In all honesty, he should have done this five years ago, but he has now genuinely stuck his neck out for cycling in my view and we'll start to see real changes happening over the next couple of years.

BBC London report on #spaceforcycling. It's a fairly shocking but important report

People came tonight for a whole host of reasons. Some wanted to say that the Mayor of London wasn't doing enough (and my view is that he is starting to do the right thing, and is starting to do it well but way, way, too late), some to say the government isn't doing enough. And an awful lot of us wanted to pay thanks to the MPs who are championing change, not least among them the members of the All Party Parliamentary Cycling Group and in particular Julian Huppert MP (LibDem), Ian Austin MP (Labour), Sarah Wollaston MP (Conservative) under the watchful eye of Lord Berkeley (Lab).

And if you need further reminding of why so many people came out tonight, I suggest you watch one of the two news clips from ITV or the BBC. They're both pretty shocking and they justify why many people were out on their bikes this evening: